It's more than 100 years since Anna Pavlova chose to leave Russia and make London her home. Some of the most iconic pictures ever taken of the Russian ballerina, including those with her pet swans, were shot at her home, the rambling Ivy House, in Highgate. Ivy House was also the base from which Pavlova ran her ballet school, training the young girls who hoped one day to join the ranks of her touring company.

Pavlova's touring was in itself a phenomenon. Other ballerinas before her had traipsed the world in search of audiences. But once she had severed links with St Petersburg, Pavlova travelled ernomous distances – to North and South America, to India, Japan and Australia – continuing to dance almost up to the day of her death in 1931.

She became the most famous ballerina of her generation – also one of the most lovingly documented. The BFI has just completed a season stocked with footage of her life and career. But there are also rich pickings on YouTube, including a precious record of her dancing The Dying Swan, the solo choreographed for her by Mikhail Fokine in 1907, which she retained as her signature piece for rest of her life, reputedly dancing it 4,000 times.

Shot in 1925, the film registers the physical distance between Pavlova and contemporary ballerinas – she doesn't stretch her feet or turn out her legs to the degree that is expected today. If you compare her with Uliana Lopatkina dancing the same solo now, it's fascinating to see how much more dramatic, even melodramatic, Pavlova's phrasing looks; how broken and crumpled the lines of her body as the Swan falters; how frantic the fluttering speed of her arms. Alongside the immaculately composed Lopatkina she looks almost like a silent screen heroine.

Yet Pavlova also looks peculiarly modern. She was mocked at school for the extreme slenderness of her limbs, and for her pale face and dark eyes – the antithesis of the tough, plumply pretty ballerinas who ruled the Mariinsky in the early 20th century. Yet by the 1930s, Pavlova's rarified physique had set the template for ballerina beauty.

Almost everyone who watched her perform remained haunted by her image. Choreographer Frederick Ashton, who saw Pavlova dance when he was a schoolboy in South America, swore it was she who inspired his choreographic career (many thought he truly wished he could have been her).

Ashton found Pavlova's arms and hands particularly expressive: the clip above of her dancing in the 1916 feature film The Dumb Girl of Portici (in which she is supported by an invisible partner) highlights the floating, romantic quality of her arms, the infinitely subtle musical extension of a phrase all the way through to her fingertips that made her such an acclaimed interpreter of roles such as Giselle.

Interestingly, in this 1925 clip of her Dionysus solo, the flattened Grecian poses of Pavlova's body, the ecstatic quality of her runs and the flying lines of drapery bear fleeting resemblance to Isadora Duncan, Ashton's other idol and, like Pavlova, one of the major influences on dance sensibility of the time.

Pavlova could be a shocking diva: one of her partners, Mikhail Mordkin, found himself being slapped round the face in the middle of a pas de deux because Pavlova believed he had bungled a lift. But what she gave to her public was the passionate investment in her dancing. In the 1915 footage below of her solo, The Dragonfly, the quivering intensity of Pavlova's arm movements and the darting, almost inhuman rhythms of her upper body, reveal her ability to transform herself into the material she was dancing.

Often the work she created herself was inspired by nature rather than people. Although Pavlova found security with her common-law husband Victor Dandre, it seemed to many that she never cared for another person as much as she cared for her animals and birds. Or for the art form for which she lived and died.